There are NO spoilers in this post because I haven’t read the trilogy.

I’ll admit that while I saw Divergent and Insurgent in bookstores, I didn’t pay any attention to Veronica Roth’s trilogy until I saw the reaction to the final book in the series, Allegiant.  I followed the distressed cry from Twitter to her Amazon page where I was stunned to see a sea of 1-star reviews despite it being on the bestseller list.  While others have since come out in favour of the book, this random review sums up the 1-star reviews:

I finished this last night and afterwards I felt just dead inside. I absolutely hate when a series ends leaving me feeling unsatisfied and even, in this case, angry. I feel kind of betrayed by the author.

Is it wrong that I’m now going to read the series just to see what is making people this upset?  And that the titles so perfectly invert in this trilogy, with fans showing great allegiance to Divergent, uprising a bit with Insurgent, and then parting ways with the author on Allegiant?

I think it’s impossible to read without expectations, especially when we’re emotionally attached to the characters.  We want Harry Potter to win over Voldemort.  We want Bella to end up with Edward but for Jacob to be happy too.  But could we have been okay with an ending where Voldemort escapes, or even worse, triumphs?  What if Bella remains human with Jacob while Edward lives in a distant vampire coven, narrowly escaping a world she realizes she doesn’t really want to be a part of for eternity?

As long as the story makes sense and the characters make choices that ring true, is it fair to put our expectations on the author and not accept the story as it’s told to us?  Is it fair to lash out because it the book doesn’t fulfill our desires?  There’s a difference between being annoyed by an ending and feeling betrayed by an author.  Or, as this reviewer states:

I have never been more disappointed in the last book of a series than I was reading this book. Normally I reread a series at least 3-4 times. Because of this book I will never read this series again, no matter how much I loved the first two books. They are ruined. Forever.

Gulp.

As people are deeply ensconced in writing their own books for NaNoWriMo, it begs the question: Is the job of author predicting what people want and giving it to them, or is it showing them a story they could have never told themselves?

I know nothing about the Divergent series, though I’m excited to start it soon.  Perhaps the ending simply doesn’t ring true; that the characters act… out of character.  I will obviously be reading it differently than any of the people who followed it from its inception since I’m going into it to figure out what was so upsetting about the ending.  And perhaps by going into it with that attitude, I won’t be able to be disappointed by the ending?  Perhaps that’s the way we should read all books?

When we were at the AFI Silver Theater, this gorgeous 75-year-old theater in Silver Spring (right off the Metro, if you’re ever in DC for any reason.  Totally worth seeing a film there just for the sake of being in the theater), to see Broadway Idiot, I saw a sign announcing a special screening of Jesus Christ Superstar for the 40th anniversary.

“Take me,” I breathed at Josh.

“Nah,” he said, despite the fact that I had broken out into Judas’s opening lament in front of the box office.  I was about to launch into a full dance number a la Simon Zealotes, chest thumping and all, but then I realized that I didn’t need Josh.  I had my girl child.

So the next morning, I sweetly told her that she’d be accompanying me to see Jesus Christ Superstar as part of her on-going musical theater education.  She was a little dubious owing to the fact that she (1) knows pretty much nothing about Jesus Christ and (2) wasn’t really in love with the music based on my kitchen performance.  But I promised her that it was going to be incredible.  And, by the way, Ted Neeley and Barry Dennen were going to be there.  She would get to be in the same room as Jesus Christ and Pontius Pilate.

When we arrived at the theater, we saw the line looping down the hallway and we debated whether or not to buy popcorn.  But ultimately risked it because a good seat without popcorn is really no better than a bad seat with popcorn.  But we lucked out and got a good seat AND popcorn.

And then we turned around and RIGHT BEHIND US WAS TED NEELEY.  I mean, yes, he was about 50 feet away and in a roped off VIP section.  But we still twisted around in our seat when I squealed at her, “it’s Jesus!”  The ChickieNob debated whether to walk over and say hello, but then decided that she would rather keep her seat and relax.  She reasoned that meeting him wouldn’t really be like meeting Jesus since he was just an actor, which was really no different from any other job.  And she thought that it must be a really annoying life because some people were acting as if they were meeting Jesus, getting emotional and tongue-tied in seeing him.  And she said it was awfully creepy the way we were all looking at him.  So we twisted back in our seat and ate through half the bag of popcorn.

Ted and Barry and the film’s distributor spoke before the film which I thought was very interesting, though the ChickieNob whispered midway through their talk that she was full of their words and ready to see the movie.  She also then whispered that she knew better than to raise her hand and tell them that in case I was worried about her manners.

Then the movie began and the ChickieNob joined me in my crush on Carl Anderson.  When he stepped off the bus in the beginning, she grabbed my arm and said, “he is so cute!”  And I said, “I know!”  And I realized that she was a MUCH better person to go to Jesus Christ Superstar with because Josh would have never critiqued Carl Anderson’s cuteness with me.  But the ChickieNob was good at leaning over and saying things like, “he sure looked cute there too” after a particularly good singing number.

And she got to see Beit Shean and Beit Guvrin, two places we’ve talked about going when we take them to Israel.  She loved that it was filmed there; really, that the whole story of Jesus Christ takes place there.  That these actors were dancing and singing in a space where she would one day be going.  You know that the second I get there, I’m going to get a distant look in my eyes and sing about how I don’t know how to love him.

After the movie, we ducked out for the bathroom, and there was an enormous line outside the men’s room.  I laughing said that I had never seen that — no line at the women’s room but an enormous line at the men’s room, and the man standing guard outside sheepishly informed me that Ted had to use the bathroom before he signed autographs, so they gave him sole use of the bathroom so he could pee undisturbed.

We decided then to skip out on the lobby where people were queuing up to meet Ted and Barry.  I’m sure they’re really nice people, but they are actors and not really Jesus Christ and Pontius Pilate.  It felt a little bit like how people forget that Daniel Radcliffe is just an actor and not the real Harry Potter.  (The real Harry Potter, of course, is in his mid-thirties and lives in London and is an Auror, DUH!)  The fact that they needed to close off the bathroom just so he could urinate in peace spoke volumes to me about the frenzy he was about to encounter in the lobby.  And since we were full of words, to quote the ChickieNob, we headed home.

Singing the score at the top of my lungs.

I read a post on Slate about the Pirahã who live in Brazil and have no words in their language for numbers.  The article explains:

The language contains no words at all for discrete numbers and only three that approximate some notion of quantity—hói, a “small size or amount,” hoí, a “somewhat larger size or amount,” and baágiso, which can mean either to “cause to come together” or “a bunch.”

I was fascinated by the idea of anumeracy because I couldn’t imagine a world without numbers.  A world where I wasn’t constantly keeping track of time, measuring ingredients, or focusing on word count.

Image: Denise Krebs via Flickr

It made me wonder how social media would change if we had no sense of our stats.  Numbers dominate social media; rule it — more than quality content when we take things away from the personal.  We are numerically-focused on how often we post.  We consciously or unconsciously count up the number of comments, subscribers, daily readers.  We are reminded of our number of followers or friends every time we log into Twitter or Facebook.  And we internalize those numbers even when we don’t want to internalize those numbers.  They mean something to us.  They change how we view our space on the Web; especially when other people’s numbers are readily available for comparison.

How would social media change if we had no sense of how many followers we had?  If we had no sense of who or how many were reading our words?  Would we be more careful, mindful of the fact that we have no concept of our reach and therefore cautious about what we say lest it bite us in the ass?  Or would it be freeing to not constantly focus on whether blogging or the like is worth our time based on the number of people our words reach?

Short of closing the comment box, not installing blog metrics, and staying off of other social media sites, it’s impossible in our number-driven world to be completely clueless of your blog’s reach in the same way that you may not have a sense of just how many people in this world care about you but you certainly can count up the people you consider friends.  We always know the minimum amount even if we don’t always know the maximum.  But sometimes knowing that minimum can affect the quality, the scope, and the frequency of our posts.

How would you blog if there was no focus for anyone on numbers?

It hit my three email threshold: I was asked multiple times how I solved level 275 of Candy Crush. So here is the answer. It is What it Is, avert your eyes. Or run screaming. Whatever you need to do because the world wants to know how I beat the chocolate and the bombs and emerged triumphant from level 275. Or… at least a few people do.

This level figuratively asks the player a thought-provoking what if: if you were to, let’s say, to have your hard drive crash, would you rather have it happen before you’ve written your Great American Novel, or after you’ve written 300 of the best pages that you’ve ever written?  If you’re someone who doesn’t care if you’ve just done a ton of work for nothing, play this board however you wish.  On the other hand, if it would be more maddening to not only lose your hard drive but lose all of your hard work, then follow my advice.

You need to work the top half of the board before you work the bottom.

So look at those two pieces of chocolate in the top two corners of the board.  They are holding back 3-move bombs.  You do not want these bombs to drop; ever.  So don’t break that chocolate.  There is no jelly beneath, so you’ll never have to touch it.

Every other square on this board has jelly.

What you want to do is get rid of those two squares next to the chocolate machines first.  In the picture above, there are green candies in the two squares.  Do NOT worry about the two squares next to that chocolate — currently the red candy and the orange candy.  Those will likely get wiped out by cascading candy at some point or you will get them with a vertical stripe.  Either way, there are ways for that jelly to pop that will not break the chocolate and release the bombs.

You want to clear those green candies first because if you mess up and the bombs drop, you only wasted two seconds of your time.  If you wait until the end and try to clear them and those bombs drop, you just erased your hard work.  So do them first and get them out of the way.

Next, clear the top half as best you can while holding the chocolate at bay.  At some point near the beginning of your game, open those fish at the bottom and release them so they eat a little jelly too. You want to do this early-ish because you have no control where those fish go.  And they could end up inadvertently releasing the bombs too.  Even better is if you can combine a striped candy (and colour) with a fish.  Again, no control, but it can clear a lot of jelly.

This is a level where vertical stripes (and if we’re talking about beneath the chocolate machines, horizontal stripes) go far.

So that’s it.  That’s how you beat level 275.

Currently: I’m on Level 288, and I’m happy to go backwards and explain how I did any board before that. Sometimes it was stupid luck but other times, there was actual thought involved (here are the other advice posts I’ve written). Let me know the level you’re struggling with.

I eat my kids’ Halloween candy.  I’m not even discreet about it.  I tell them when they wake up in the morning.  I leave the wrappers at the top of the rubbish bin.  We have a fairly symbiotic relationship in that I like what they don’t (for instance, huge fan of Mounds, whereas no one else in the house likes coconut).  But I also have no shame in taking what they do like.  My feeling is that as long as I am willing to replace said candy by purchasing them more candy in the future, then I should be able to dip into the sweet loot they collected last night.

I do this knowing that I would have been upset if my parents had eaten my candy.

This probably makes me a terrible person.  I would spend some time thinking about that, but I’m too busy eating through their Kit-Kat bars.

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I love the creepy haunted doll reading your mind video:

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The 2013 Creme de la Creme is trucking along.  There are currently 56 on the list with over a month and a half left to go until the hard deadline (December 15!).  So, are you on the list yet?  Extra love to people who submit early!

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “The Weight of Being Interesting, and Pumpkin Spice Cookies” (A Half Baked Life)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Bits and Peaces has a post about the fear that comes at the end of a pregnancy; both for the labour and delivery, but also that time after when you are responsible for this other person’s life and you don’t know if you’ll be up to the task.  Her son was born since she published this post, so it makes for an even more interesting read since she is now in that next stage she feared.

A Little Bit More has a great post about actually rescuing a kitten from a tree — yes, it really happens!  I loved this post just because it’s a really good story well-told with kitten pictures to boot.  Enjoy!

Birds, Bees, and Medicine has a post about her world slowing down during a power outage.  I bookmarked it, thinking, “maybe I should declare certain evenings ‘power outage’ evenings and act as if we have no power.”  And moments after thinking that, I heard a strange snap and then OUR POWER WENT OUT.  This post must be extremely powerful because it cut out power to my entire town for about a half hour…  And guess what? Being without power is really hard, especially when you have stuff you need to get done.  So rethinking power outage evenings.

Cracked up reading Sweetest in the Gale’s post about the art in her RE’s office.   She writes, “Paying out of pocket for my monitoring appointments is so worth it because it’s not just a trip to the doctor–it’s like a trip to the museum. It’s a chance to experience art, people.”  It’s worth clicking over just for the mer-family.

Lastly, I read two posts back-to-back about the same idea: that not every parent has a birth story.  A+ for Effort and Family Building with a Twist both talk about being with other parents bonding over their birth stories and not being able to participate.  Both posts serve as either a great reminder or a brand-new way of viewing that bonding practice, depending on your life experience thus far.  And both are incredibly well-written.

The roundup to the Roundup: I eat the twins’ candy, and I feel no shame.  Love the creepy mind-reading doll.  The 2013 Creme de la Creme opened: is your post on the list?  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between October 25th and November 1st) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.